Salesforce Interview Experience for SDE Internship 2021

Salesforce came to my college in august 2021 for an SDE intern, the criteria were 7+ GPA and no backlog and any branch. The test started with an online coding test consisting 3 Questions to be solved in 90 mins on hackerrank. the questions were easy/moderate, 1 Question involved the concept of CIDR (networking) which most of were not aware of so most of us left it untouched, but i was able to deduce some pattern from the given examples and 2/10 tc passed though it doesn’t matter. after this students were shortlisted based on those 2 Questions and the time duration, i was able to do them within 30mins and got selected for the interview.

Tech Interview 1: 20 students were shortlisted and were divided into slots each slot consisting 5-6 students and all of them were given the same question at the same time but in different meets, the question was very tricky and out of 6 only 2 got shortlisted including me.

It started with a brief introduction and then he moved on to the questions

• Coding Question: Given a sorted array having where all elements are repeated twice but one is repeated thrice, find the element repeated thrice in O(logn) time. i was not able to solve the question at first but my approach was close i asked him about a hint so he told me apart from using the middle element can u think of using the middle index as well in your condition i was able to catch the hint and solved the question.
• After this question, he asked me about pagination and page faults and some basics of OOPs

Tech Interview 2: Out of 20 8 got selected for this round

• It started with a brief introduction and then he gave me a Question similar to: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-the-row-with-maximum-number-1s/
• He twisted the question a little bit after i gave him a approach i gave him 4 approaches, 2 were of O(R*C), 1 was O(R*logC) and the last one was O(R+C) with optimisation, he was satisfied and didn’t tell me to code and proceeded to the next question that was similar to: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reverse-a-list-in-groups-of-given-size/. but included doubly linked list instead, i illustrated and then coded my solution. he verified it by a dry run

Then proceeded to some CS core questions,

1. Difference between inheritance and composition
2. How can you use inheritance to serve different purposes,(i said to reduce redundancy, ensuring security and we can also use it to implement some functions whose implementation is not known by using pure virtual function)
3. Abstract class
4. Whenever you search a url how is data received?

I couldn’t give the answer to the 4th one but told him that i could use something like this(a blunt approach) he told me that you should have been curious of such things and should have googled it even if u weren’t taught. After an hour i was notified for my HR

HR Round: It started from introduction 

• Then he asked and discussed my hobbies after that a detailed discussion started from my projects.
• He asked me how will i implement a biding system and increase its robustness. 
• He then asked me if i had any question for him, he answered my questions and ended the interview.

After 6 hours the result was declared and 4 of us were selected including me.

Overall the experience was quite interesting and i learned a couple of things, the interviewers were very polite and kind, they gave me hints whenever i stuck and the hr was also very exciting as he was paying attention and was taking a lot interest in my projects and hobbies which boosted my confidence.

PS: Salesforce doesn’t see your CGPA, it only seeks qualified candidates. i too have less than 8 GPA.